Blog 6/23 – Lehigh Bacterial Genomics

Hello there! My name is Vincia and I’m from Columbus, Indiana, around an hour south of Indianapolis. Lowkey, today has been QUITE overwhelming, but I think I’m just not used to the fast pace of camp yet. We started the day bright and early with breakfast at 7:15, but if I’m going to be honest, I may have been running a liiiiItle late… The highlight of my breakfast was definitely the tater tots, which I got three plates of (shhh).

After breakfast, we made our first trek to Steps, or the building where our lectures and labs take place. Our first lecture was with Dr. Mano about our model organism, Vibrio natriegens, and antibiotic resistance. We then transferred to Dr. Pina’s lecture about lab notebooking, followed by a lecture about lab safety protocols.

Our first lab session involved calibrating our chemostats. Unfortunately, we accidentally forgot to save our calibrations, so we ended up having to do some recalibration later on in the day (fortunately, it did not take too much time). After another lecture about aseptic technique, we went to lunch.

Noteworthy dishes from lunch include a corn and bacon chowder (looked kind of sus but was actually buss) and the maple-glazed sweet potatoes!

I must note here, that Pennsylvania is in the middle of a heat wave, and that it is atrociously hot and HUMID. I think I’m speaking for the crowd when I say that we all felt pretty musty by this point, but I guess we’ll just wait it out.

Post lunch, we learned about photobacterium leiognathi and how they collectively glow via quorum sensing. Afterwards, we practiced aseptic techniques with inoculating our bacterial plates with the glowing bacteria.

We also made some agar art, so I decided to make Mike Wazowski (ofc ofc). See the pic below from the day after for the results 🙂

We had assigned seats for dinner, but honestly I enjoyed getting to know a couple more people!

Following a very yummy dinner featuring the ultra blue Cookie Monster ice cream (kind of mid tbh but wins extra points for staining your mouth afterwards), we headed back to the lab to work through our first problem sets. We caught an insane sunset (and proceeded to have a photoshoot), before going back to our work. Concerningly, we’ve only finished the half of the first pset we’ve worked on, so I guess we’ll have to work extra hard tomorrow…

Anyways, that’s all for the night!

Always checking our protocols,

Vincia (Team Freesips)

Vincia

Lehigh Bacterial Genomics Participant

My name is Vincia and I’m from Columbus, Indiana.